"I never do, unnecessarily. There are too many necessary chances that
have to be taken, in this work." Verkan Vall pressed the button on the
hand battery. The globe on the floor flashed and vanished. "Yesterday,
five paratimers were arrested. Any or all of them could have had
door-activators with them. Stranor Sleth says they were not tortured,
but that is a purely inferential statement. They may have been, and
the use of the activator may have been extorted from one of them. So I
want a look at the inside of that conveyer-chamber before we transpose
into it."
He laid the hand battery, with the loose-dangling wire that had been
left behind, on the desk, then lit a cigarette. The others gathered
around, smoking and watching, careful to avoid the place from which
the globe had vanished. Thirty minutes passed, and then, in a queer
iridescence, the globe reappeared. Verkan Vall counted ten seconds and
picked it up, taking it to the desk and opening it to remove a small
square box. This he slid into a space under the desk and flipped a
switch. Instantly, a view-screen lit up and a three-dimensional
picture appeared--the interior of a big room a hundred feet square and
some seventy in height. There was a big desk and a radio; tables,
couches, chairs and an arms-rack full of weapons, and at one end, a
remarkably clean sixty-foot circle on the concrete floor, outlined in
faintly luminous red.
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